A Survey of Recent Books on Pennsylvania Political History, 1787–1877

REVIEW ESSAY “Corrupt and Contented”: Where Have All the Politicians Gone? A Survey of Recent Books on Pennsylvania Political History, 1787–1877 N THE SHAME OF THE CITIES (1904), Lincoln Steffens, the greatest of the “muckrakers,” wrote that Philadelphia politicians were I“Corrupt and Contented” and implied that this was true of the entire Pennsylvania state machine. These Republicans, led in their heyday by the bigger-than-life Senator Matt Quay, were so dominant that they even financed their opponents in order to maintain the fiction of a working two-party system. But Steffens focused on local politicians—those who held public office and “pulled the strings.” As much as he disliked the sit- uation, he named names and had a certain respect for the political game and the actual functions that these unsavory, but politically savvy, fellows performed for their constituents—such as getting someone’s boy out of jail or finding some spare coal for a poor family on a cold winter’s night. Today we call that “service” to one’s constituents, and congressmen often remain in office for doing similar favors. Lately, Pennsylvania historians have strayed from a concern for politicians and how, in plying their trade, they made government function in the past. Like Steffens, they seem to be bothered that Pennsylvania’s is not exactly a story of democracy at work. In 1973, Philip S. Klein and Ari Hoogenboom produced what many considered to be the definitive one-volume history of the state of Pennsylvania.1 Not quite thirty years later, Randall M. Miller and William Pencak edited a new and quite different “History of the 1 Philip S. Klein and Ari Hoogenboom, A History of Pennsylvania (New York, 1973; 2nd and enlarged ed., University Park, PA, 1980). PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY Vol. CXXXII, No. 4 (October 2008) 434 WILLIAM G. SHADE October Commonwealth.”2 The former is in many ways traditional, and the latter is original and certainly avant garde! Together they have served the commonwealth far better than most other state histories.3 They are both readable, and the latter has a wealth of information and covers topic areas that no other state history has ever delved into. Their differences in rela- tion to political history, however, tell less about the authors involved than about the changes in American historians’ perceptions during the last forty years. While Klein and Hoogenboom touched on social, economic, and cultural history, the structural backbone of their book was political history.4 In contrast, social history largely drives the narrative of Pennsylvania history in the first four hundred pages of Miller and Pencak’s lengthy edited volume. Though the political monographs cited by Klein and Hoogenboom do not appear in the bibliographies at the end of each chapter in Miller and Pencak’s work, they inform—at least implicitly— the thinking about the political framework and functions of parties and government. The prevailing political interest in the Miller and Pencak volume, however, remains political culture, political activism outside the voting booth, and the control of the public square by competing religious, ethnic, racial, and other groups; a recounting of electoral behavior is of lesser importance to them. These different perspectives reflect the way in which the focus of pro- 2 Randall M. Miller and William Pencak, eds., Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth (University Park, PA, 2002). An older history written by Paul A. W. Wallace, Pennsylvania: Seed of a Nation (New York, 1962), reflected the author’s expertise on the history of Native Americans as well as his interest in cultural history. 3 I say this as the coauthor of a very good new politically oriented state history of Virginia: Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607–2007 (Charlottesville, VA, 2007). 4 For the nineteenth century, they relied upon a series of monographs influenced by Roy F. Nichols and most often mentored by Klein at Penn State: Robert L. Brunhouse, The Counter- Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1776–1890 (Harrisburg, PA, 1971); Harry M. Tinkcom, The Republicans and Federalists in Pennsylvania, 1790–1801 (Harrisburg, PA, 1950); Philip S. Klein, Pennsylvania Politics: A Game without Rules, 1817–1832 (Philadelphia, 1940); Charles M. Snyder, The Jacksonian Heritage: Pennsylvania Politics, 1833–1848 (Harrisburg, PA, 1958); John F. Coleman, The Disruption of the Pennsylvania Democracy, 1848–1860 (Harrisburg, PA, 1975); Erwin S. Bradley, The Triumph of Militant Republicanism: A Study of Pennsylvania and Presidential Politics, 1860–1872 (Philadelphia, 1964); and Frank B. Evans, Pennsylvania Politics, 1872–1877: A Study in Political Leadership (Harrisburg, PA, 1966). See also the numerous refer- ences to Pennsylvania politics in two books by Nichols: The Disruption of American Democracy (New York, 1948); and The Invention of the American Political Parties: A Study in Political Improvisation (New York, 1967). 2008 REVIEW ESSAY 435 fessional history in the United States has changed during my lifetime. The trend in the profession has been away from the political narrative toward a broader methodological approach. The following essay is an attempt to examine the various ways in which books written in the last quarter century have portrayed Pennsylvania political history in the century from the movement for a new constitution in the 1780s through the Civil War and the unraveling of Reconstruction in the 1880s.5 It was surely a crucial century in American political life and in the evolving political history of the Keystone State. Historiographers often try to chart the shifting winds in the profession by clustering past practitioners into “schools” that represent the themes emphasized in each era. For the first half of the twentieth century, “Progressive History,” associated most prominently with the work of Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard, dominated the profession.6 The “Progressive” historians emphasized economic conflict between the business classes and the “others”—primarily the farmers and workingmen—that fueled the cyclical, but on the whole progressive, advance of democracy.7 A reaction set in after World War II. New work by Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter, and Louis Hartz, among others, emphasized a consensus among Americans regarding liberal democracy. Although neither Hofstadter nor Hartz would readily accept the label of “Consensus” historian,8 historians following their lead saw “the party battle” as a matter 5 For reasons of space, this article will focus on books—monographs—and avoid the collections of essays, important though they are, such as: Theodore Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981); Russell F. Weigley, Nicholas B. Wainwright, and Edwin Wolf II, eds., Philadelphia: A 300-Year History (New York, 1982); Michael J. Birkner, ed., James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850s (Selinsgrove, PA, 1996); and William A. Blair and William Pencak, eds., Making and Remaking Pennsylvania’s Civil War (University Park, PA, 2001). Although it is not specifically on Pennsylvania, Robert F. Engs and Randall M. Miller, eds., The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans’ First Generation (Philadelphia, 2002) includes a collection of political images from the Library Company of Philadelphia that reveal the relevance of posters and broadsides in the period. 6 On this very important “school,” see Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, 1968); and Ernst A. Breisach, American Progressive History: An Experiment in Modernization (Chicago, 1993). 7 Among the studies of Pennsylvania politics mentioned above, Brunhouse, Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania presents a “Progressive” perspective. 8 Hofstadter and Hartz had the most profound effects in defining liberal democracy, the bedrock interest of the “Consensus” historians, while Boorstin was more of a “popular” historian who also gained influence by writing in public-policy and general-interest publications. See especially Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955); and Louis Hartz, The 436 WILLIAM G. SHADE October of electoral machines seeking the vote rather than as a conflict between progressive and reactionary classes.9 The “New Political History” emerged out of this tradition in the 1960s. These “New” political historians, such as Lee Benson, Samuel P.Hays, and Allan Bogue, promoted the idea that ethnoreligious cultural differences heavily affected American political interests and behavior, and they used political theory and quantitative analysis to a much greater extent than had traditional political historians.10 In time, however, the “New” political historians shared the stage with “Neo-Progressives” and historians engaged in writing the “New Social History,” the “New Labor History,” and/or the “New Urban History,” or combinations of them. All of these scholars reemphasized factors of class and ideology in their commentary on past politics. African Americans, Native Americans, and women increasingly became important subjects in the study of the American past.11 These various schools and perspectives all have been reflected in studies of the Keystone State.12 Any survey of the recent literature on politics in Pennsylvania during the first century under the U.S. Constitution would show that the results are uneven and that the best recent studies deal with the early republic. However, in two of the most important recent books treating the early nineteenth century, Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution: Jacksonian Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York, 1955). In general, see John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore, 1989). 9 This is best illustrated in a work by Roy Nichols’s premier student, Richard P.McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (Chapel Hill, NC, 1966), which has an excellent chapter on Pennsylvania.

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